The adoption, growth, and continued success of an online question and answering (Q&A) site such as Stack Overflow (SO) depend on two major factors – (1) participation of users and (2) quality of the shared knowledge [1]}, [2]}, [3]}.
SO thus introduces an edit system to promote quality by allowing its users to communicate on the quality of the posts through editing. In particular, collaborative editing helps to keep posts clear, relevant, and up-to-date.
For example, users often edit posts to fix grammar and spelling mistakes, clarify the meaning, and add related resources or hyperlinks. Unfortunately, many suggested edits in SO get rejected because of undesired (i.e., it does not satisfy the post owner) editing or violating edit guidelines [4]}. However, edits can be rejected in two ways – rollback and expert review. Rollback reverts a post to a previous version in the edit history [5]} and thereby rejects one/multiple revisions. On the other hand, experts (e.g., users with a reputation score \(\ge \)  \(2K\) ) can reject if suggested edits do not improve the quality of the posts.
However, manual identification of undesired edits or edits that violate the editing guidelines wastes community time and effort. For example, one user responded to the issue of the identification of undesired edits manually, “It takes time to read and parse through those questions when I am trying to spend my time more efficiently reading through the actual question and figuring out how to answer it appropriately” [6]}.
At least 921 users supported this comment by casting upvotes. It suggests that manually identifying undesired edits wastes users' valuable time and resources. On the other hand, users who suggest edits and later get rejected become frustrated because many users (especially novices) are unaware of editing guidelines [7]}. Unfortunately, the existing editing system of SO does not identify the rejected edits with the potential rejection reasons. Therefore, a study on automatic identification of rejected edits with reasons is warranted to assist SO users.
